Chapter 60: Thinking Forward

  ADMINISTRATOR POV

  Things were finally proceeding the way I’d like. Sure, they weren’t perfect – there were certainly a lot of zigs, zags, and unexpected twists – but for the most part, it looked like my tweaks were working.

  I hadn’t gotten around to checking every settlement or group to see if they would also spawn the [Horizon Bearer] class, but the fact that the first Aravel settlement the group ran into had one was encouraging. I really should have looked for that ahead of time, but I’d been more concerned at the time about the Veil and how they’d react to some Calen elves wandering into their territory.

  Really, no excuse – considering all the time I had in my Sanctuary to look into this. I was starting to realize that the biggest problem wasn’t that I couldn’t check everything, but that I didn’t have the mental discipline to do it. The job was just… monotonous. I could see why other Administrators set up sub-terminals to monitor things and bring important details to their attention.

  Then again, if the gods I create are anything like the Greek gods, maybe that would be a terrible idea all around.

  Note to self: make sure not to create Zeus by accident.

  I glanced at the rubber duck and sighed. Out loud I said, “Yes, I know creating things like the Greek gods is bound to generate a lot of energy… but it still seems like more trouble than it’s worth.”

  I went quiet after that, and the thought made me wonder if the Greek gods from my own world – and similar pantheons from Earth – had actually been real at one point, only to be removed for causing too much of a ruckus.

  I’d been very careful about asking after anything concerning Earth since coming here. Most likely, it was under time acceleration, and humanity was extinct… or at least everyone I knew was dead. The fact that I didn’t know who I knew made it a little easier to let go.

  I also wondered if removing life memories was standard procedure before Orpheus started meddling with the process, but that was a question I could wait to ask her myself.

  It really was a pity that the Aravel elves tended to be so cautious about exploring. With their genetic memory, they’d be ideal at cataloging things. Since they were relatively rare, that would make a great thing for quest fodder.

  Pondering that gave me an idea, and I quickly opened up my interface and cobbled together another class. By now, this was easier… and it didn’t cost me much at all to do so. A variant of the [Horizon Bearer] class that gained experience by cataloging new things and bringing that knowledge back seemed like it would be useful for almost anyone. But an Aravel-only version, exclusive to that subspecies, could be an interesting addition as well.

  I finished up both classes – a regular and an Aravel variant – and closed out the interface.

  Some things I could do pretty quickly, but every time I made a small change like that – something to help nudge progress forward – it made me think about heavier things.

  Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this job.

  Then again, I was pretty sure Orpheus wasn’t cut out for being my superior either.

  The more things change, the more they stay the same, don’t they? I might not have my personal memories from Earth, but I could still remember that saying… and how common it was for workers to doubt their managers’ competence.

  Maybe Orpheus did a whole lot more than I knew, and I wasn’t qualified to judge. She was certainly more familiar with alien concepts than I was, so maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on her. I doubted she had intentionally taken over the job, so it was likely that, just like me, she’d been shoved into the position and had to do her best.

  But now I had to address the elephant in the room.

  Or… maybe I shouldn’t use that expression, since Diamon wasn’t here anymore. They had literally been an elephant in the room… and now they weren’t here.

  My wry internal jokes aside, the real problem I had to address was that I’d made the world very big, and the elves occupied only a very small part of it. They didn’t breed quickly, either. Downside was still a little early in its development, but neither of the major species there had the slow-breeding problem the elves did.

  The dwarves had some ability to control their population, but I really didn’t want to think about them quite yet. I was starting to regret making the dwarves… even if I was proud of how unique they were. I’d have to look in on them later and see if I could make some adjustments – maybe add classes or tweak their terrain to make them more interesting.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  I could make minor tweaks to species like I’d done with the Aravel, but that had been relatively expensive. Anything more than very, very small adjustments would cost too much. Not to mention that the balance was hard to predict. Make a species breed too slow and it wouldn’t give me what I wanted. Too fast, and the chaos could collapse the entire system.

  I still had thousands of Reality Points left, but my income wasn’t increasing nearly as fast as my spending. Unless I could really ramp up my income, I needed to be careful. That was where investments came in.

  I already had one developing that would hopefully bring in a lot more, but now that I’d seen the world through the eyes of the natives, I could think of other possibilities. It wasn’t that they lacked challenges – given all the strange creatures and magical terrain around them – but being the only intelligent species meant they could settle into relatively safe niches far too easily.

  I needed to add more outside pressure… and more unpredictability. I didn’t like that idea, because I preferred things to be predictable, but unpredictability was what gave rise to challenges in the first place.

  Perhaps the elves could become more profitable a few thousand years down the road, but I couldn’t wait that long. Yet… most of the solutions I had weren’t ones I wanted to sink energy into. I had a few options of varying cost, so I’d have to see how much I earned in the next few cycles before deciding what to invest in.

  In the meantime, I knew what I had to do. Upside belonged to the elves – that had always been my intent. They were supposed to be the first species, breeding slowly so that they could become the older civilization the younger races looked up to.

  That made for a neat story.

  But stories didn’t give me energy. Events did.

  I couldn’t dance around the topic anymore… I needed at least one more intelligent species that would breed faster.

  The trick was making sure they weren’t so prolific or powerful that they wiped out the elves while both were still primitive.

  I might not have the energy to add them right away – adding a new species to the world tended to be pretty expensive. Even the relatively small number of elves I’d needed just to get a viable breeding population in each area had cost me hundreds of Reality Points.

  What I could do was look at candidates to base a new species on. It didn’t cost anything to design one, and as a bonus, it would tell me how much it would cost to place that species later. I figured I might as well start on that now and just not execute it yet. That would give me time to think of potential issues with each design that I might not have considered otherwise.

  It still felt a little awkward seeing how the Aravel had turned out. Maybe it was because I’d been in Tastka’s head, and she was female… that probably amplified what I saw and felt. My idea for the Aravel hadn’t been intended to result in such a male-dominated society, but in hindsight it made sense. From the perspective of a mortal, what the Aravel did was perfectly logical. I just didn’t like it.

  I brushed that thought aside and looked over some of the candidates. I needed something that would breed quickly, but not be as powerful as an elf. Either that, or they needed some other reason not to exterminate the elves. The ideal design would be a species with no reason to go to war with them… but the only way to ensure that would be to make sure they never really interacted, which defeated the purpose of adding another intelligent race in the first place.

  Well, maybe not entirely – the species itself could generate energy through its own development – but it would be even better if that came from their interactions with others.

  I had to be careful. I definitely didn’t want to be responsible for generations of war or attempted genocide. I had a nagging thought that other Administrators would say that was a great way to generate energy, but I was pretty sure I couldn’t live with myself afterward.

  If you could call what I was doing living, really. I mostly just worked on my universe. I didn’t really have any downtime, did I?

  That was one advantage of having the incarnate avatar, I realized. Living those moments as Tastka – even if they were dangerous at times, or boring to her – gave me something beyond this endless responsibility to focus on.

  It probably would’ve been even better if she didn’t have the [Soulkeeper] class. I wondered if I could find a way to block that off from future incarnate avatars…

  I added that to my to-do list.

  For now, I looked over the candidates. Sapience wasn’t something that came in a great leap… it came together in bits and pieces, and could take many different forms. My interface told me as much, though I’d intentionally stuck with things that had at least a mostly human-like perspective so far.

  “Maybe I should branch out a little from that.”

  My interface could identify sentient beings that were beginning to develop traits that could be considered sapient, and that gave me a few starting points. It was how I’d found the species the elves were based on to begin with. Widening that search criteria gave me some interesting options.. one of which I immediately set aside to work on in more detail later.

  I’d largely ignored the oceans, and that had been a mistake, hadn’t it? Sure, I knew the usual stories about aquatic elves, mermen, mermaids, and the like… but I didn’t want that.

  However, an underwater empire of octopus people sounded pretty baller. I was definitely going to look into something like that.

  The options for land-based species seemed promising too. I selected about half a dozen to refine further later, but there were a few I knew I definitely wanted… if I had the Reality Points for them. Uplifting these naturally evolved creatures gave me far more interesting results than simply crafting my own species from scratch, like I had with the dwarves.

  I was still pleased with how I’d handled the dwarves, but some of what I was seeing here was giving me much more exciting ideas. The only problem was that once I looked at the options, I had an enormous number of them, and a frantic bounce from concept to concept.

  My to-do list also had a reminder to create some kind of species for the Upside end cap as well. I’d originally intended something like gnomes, but now that I’d seen how much diversity I could build, that felt boring.

  I wanted this world to be amazing. I wanted it to be the kind of place someone from Earth could come to and find unique… without anything dull or derivative.

  Besides, the interface wouldn’t even let me develop a species of gnomes with a genetic tendency to wear big red conical hats, so what was the point?

  A New Perspective

  Ziril did some sketches of the elves! They’re weirdly close to how I envisioned them, too.